Page 42 of Velvet Chains

I wanted to be the DA.

But more than that, I needed to protect my daughter.

And if it cost me this job, well, fuck it. That was just the price I was going to have to pay. No matter how much it hurt.

Chapter Thirteen: Kieran

Iwas very good at playing innocent.

What I was not good at was leaving Ruby Marquez alone.

I wanted to protect her, Iwantedto watch her back and fucking kill anyone who touched her…but I also knew the best thing I could do to help her was to stay the fuck away. The feds were still sniffing around, watching, waiting for me to fuck up.

They weren’t the first ones to take a seat and wait for my inevitable misstep.

But that meant I knew exactly how to put on a show.

I was on my best boy behavior. I went to the gym in the morning, had lunch at the same spot every day, jogged in the afternoon and then went to a club—whichever club Tristan had me working—at night. When it was late and Liam would ask me if I wanted to go out the back to smoke a joint with him, I told him to waituntil we got in my car. So that was what we did, and the days and nights passed by in a blur as I slowly felt Ruby slipping away.

I’d flagged her name for news alerts, so I read about her obsessively. The DA didn’t make the news that often, but she granted a couple of interviews, and I would play a local podcast she had been on on repeat so I could fall asleep to her voice. Maybe that made me a hopeless romantic, but I didn’t give a fuck; I was also a chronic insomniac, and Ruby’s voice was better than ketamine.

But damn, if it wasn’t fucking hard to stay away from her. I could trick my body into stillness, but not my brain…and I thought maybe I just needed more time for things to settle, then I could swoop back in when there weren’t a thousand sets of eyes on us.

Time, however, wasn’t a luxury I had–because Tristan was on a tighter schedule.

Tristan summoned me to his house within a month of my last encounter with Ruby…which meant something had changed. I’d managed to avoid talking to him one-on-one about anything other than business and distribution, but he was clearly on edge.

I parked in front of the Callahan-Orsini mansion and sighed, looking at my reflection in the rearview mirror before I walked inside. It was almost Christmas, and there was a thin layer of silvery snow on the ground. It was almost picturesque, a fucking winter wonderland. They’d hired decorators to hang lights that covered almost every inch of the grand house, every single window had a wreath on it, and there was a massive Christmas tree in the living room.

And it all looked just like a funeral to me. Or…forme, if Tristan had gotten wind I talked to the feds.

I rang the doorbell, half-afraid that Adriana would answer with a pair of garden shears, ready to chase me out. But when the door opened, I found only empty air–until my eyes tracked downward to find my tiny, angelic blonde niece, Catherine.

“Uncle Kieran!” she exclaimed.

She threw her arms around me, tiny bony limbs almost squeezing the life out of me.

“Hey, little menace. Where are your brothers?”

She shrugged. “I hid them in the coat closet,” she said.

I cocked my head. “Even the baby?”

“Matteo can push the door open if he wants to. He doesn’t want to.”

I held back laughter. “Are they going to be able to breathe in there?”

“We’ll see,” she replied, the smile on her face too wide.

She would get along with Rosie,I thought, then I pushed the idea out before it had time to settle.

“Who’s gonna be able to breathe?” Tristan asked, coming up behind her. “Jesus, Catherine. Leave the man alone and go play with your toys. Your mom is going to kill you if she hears you hid your brothers in the closet, so go get them out.”

“You’re not the boss of me, Daddy.”

“Pretty sure I am, love,” he said, laughing and ruffling her ponytail.

“If you’re the boss of me, and Mommy is your boss, doesn’t that mean Mommy is my boss?”